Regulation in the Shadows of Private Law

With proponents of deregulation ascendant, both domestically and around the world, private regulation appears to be an attractive solution to a seemingly intractable problem—assuming it is or can be effective. This Article adds an important corrective to standard accounts of private legal regulation and its effectiveness. Existing scholarship generally looks to the formal contract terms as the key to understanding private regulation and to evaluating its impact. This practice needs to be rethought. The relationship between contracting parties, as well as the regulatory authority that one party exerts over the other, can be quite different than the relationship described by the formal contract terms. This Article illustrates the problem with the scholarly assumption that formal contract language reliably describes the private regulatory relationships they establish. It does so through an in-depth analysis of a form of private contracting with great regulatory potential: the loan guarantees and associated political risk insurance policies underwritten by the World Bank. Such policies are purchased by corporations to mitigate the risks associated with doing business in under-regulated jurisdictions. Because, on their face, the terms of these policies require socially responsible corporate behavior, they appear to be a promising form of private regulation, succeeding in imposing significant obligations on corporations that traditional public regulation has failed to mandate. But these formal terms reveal little about the true nature of the private regulatory relationships they create. Even though the policy terms themselves are unlikely ever to be formally enforced, the policyholders often have significant incentives to go above and beyond the contract requirements if requested to do so by the underwriter. But whether they are in fact being asked to do so, and whether they are in fact complying if they are being asked, is unclear. The World Bank provides considerable transparency surrounding the terms of its policies and the process for obtaining them. However, little information is available regarding its post-contracting interactions with policyholder corporations. Providing data about these interactions could be done relatively easily and without infringing upon the confidentiality interests that it, and its policyholders, may have. To the extent that entities like the World Bank are serious about their corporate social responsibility policies, it is imperative that information about the actual contracting relationship—and not just the formal contract terms—be made available

Preserving Minors’ Rights After Casey: The “New Battlefield” of Negligence and Strict Liability Statutes

Simultaneous Switching Noise (SSN) is one of the major problems in today highspeed circuits. Power-Ground voltage fluctuation is significantly increasing due to L ∗ (di/dt)) noise known as Power-Ground bounce and can be one major noise source in modern and mixed-signal circuit design. In this thesis first SSN and its sources are studied followed by some theoretical analysis, then we present some clock shapes that cause in SSN reduction. In this thesis, we investigate different clocking techniques in order to reduce SSN. The effect of rise/fall time variation, applying sinusoidal, multi-segment and harmonic suppressed clocks have been investigated and verified by proper circuit simulations. Multi-segment clock shape and harmonic suppression clock shape produce less noise in comparison to conventional clock, so using them as clock of the whole system can be act as noise reduction technique

Subexponential groups in 4-manifold topology

We present a new, more elementary proof of the Freedman-Teichner result that the geometric classification techniques (surgery, s-cobordism, and pseudoisotopy) hold for topological 4-manifolds with groups of subexponential growth. In an appendix Freedman and Teichner give a correction to their original proof, and reformulate the growth estimates in terms of coarse geometry.Comment: Published by Geometry and Topology at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/GTVol4/paper14.abs.htm

Loop algebras, gauge invariants and a new completely integrable system

One fruitful motivating principle of much research on the family of integrable systems known as ``Toda lattices'' has been the heuristic assumption that the periodic Toda lattice in an affine Lie algebra is directly analogous to the nonperiodic Toda lattice in a finite-dimensional Lie algebra. This paper shows that the analogy is not perfect. A discrepancy arises because the natural generalization of the structure theory of finite-dimensional simple Lie algebras is not the structure theory of loop algebras but the structure theory of affine Kac-Moody algebras. In this paper we use this natural generalization to construct the natural analog of the nonperiodic Toda lattice. Surprisingly, the result is not the periodic Toda lattice but a new completely integrable system on the periodic Toda lattice phase space. This integrable system is prescribed purely in terms of Lie-theoretic data. The commuting functions are precisely the gauge-invariant functions one obtains by viewing elements of the loop algebra as connections on a bundle over $S^1$

Derivation of the stress concentrations at holes in orthotropic plates using thermoelastic stress analysis

An experimental study of the stress distribution around holes in orthotropic composite laminates has been conducted using thermoelastic stress analysis (TSA). Quantitative thermoelastic studies of stress concentrations in metallic plates is a straightforward matter, all that is required is the ratio of the response from the hole and a far-field reading. For orthotropic materials the situation is more complex as the response is not simply proportional to the sum of the principal stresses. In general the thermoelastic response of an orthotropic laminate is a function of the stresses in the principal surface material directions and the associated coefficient of thermal expansion. The approach in this paper is to obtain ‘stress factors’ at the hole and identify the maxima in the plot. Specimens manufactured from a variety of different laminate lay-ups (unidirectional (UD), cross-ply (CP), angle-ply (AP) and quasi-isotropic (QI)) are considered. In all these cases the principal stress directions at the hole are not coincident with the principal material directions and it is a challenging proposition to derive meaningful stress data from these configurations. To validate the approach the experimental data are compared to analytical models. To better understand the nature of the response finite element models are produced that mimic the thermoelastic response

Identification of the source of the thermoelastic response from orthotropic laminated composites

In previous work, a series of theoretical considerations have been made aimed at identifying the source and assessing prominent factors influencing the thermoelastic response from laminated composites. In this paper four different methods of interpreting the data are investigated and the theoretical thermoelastic response is compared to experimental data to identify the source of the thermoelastic response